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A Game of Chance (Audience Spins First)

Luke Miller and Peter B. Schmitz performing in her latest project, “The People to Come,” at Brown University in Providence, R.I. The project has its New York premiere on June 25 at the Invisible Dog Center in Brooklyn.Credit
Darrin Wright

Here are three words that strike fear in the hearts of many: participatory dance performance.

As the choreographer Yanira Castro recently explained in a restaurant not far from her Brooklyn home, “it makes me think of an audience in seats and suddenly they’re asked onstage, and there’s all this discomfort because you’re going to make them to do something they don’t want to do.” And yet, “participatory” is an unavoidable label for Ms. Castro’s latest work, “The People to Come.”

In this new project, which will receive its New York premiere on June 25 at the Invisible Dog Art Center in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, five dancers each create two 19-minute solos based on material — sketches, photos, patterns, tasks — submitted by audience members. And it all happens right before the viewers’ eyes, over the course of four hours.

For the last decade, Ms. Castro has been questioning the relationship between performers and audience. In her 2010 work “Wilderness,” the performers took cues from audience behavior, although the audience members were not made aware of how they were participating.

“I was trying to create a metaphor for theater,” she recalled, “a space where you don’t know what’s going to happen. But I was amazed at what the performers could do, how they were thinking so hard, and I wanted to make that transparent.”

In “The People to Come,” each of the performers — all men — cycles twice through three phases. First he spends 19 minutes gathering material from “the archive,” the trove of material that the public has submitted, either at the gallery or through the project’s Web site. Then he has 19 minutes to rehearse in front of everyone, after which, illuminated by footlights and accompanied by music, he performs his 19-minute dance.

Except for the beginning and the end of each evening, there are always at least two performers in different phases. “I wanted to have these duets to make clear that performance is just part of the process,” Ms. Castro said.

“You could follow one performer through,” she continued, “or camp out and let it wash over you. You can submit work. You can leave at all times. You can fall away and come back. I want to create a space for the audience to make choices. Unlike in a proscenium setting, there is no set role for you other than the role you make for yourself.”

Ms. Castro has submitted her own work to the archive, a 19-minute solo originally created for the dancer Heather Olson, a longtime colleague. “It stands in for me,” Ms. Castro said, “and also for a female presence, as a sort of ghost.”

The dancers may draw from that solo, or not, but the composer Stephan Moore did use its structure to create a score of time demarcations that he sent to dozens of musicians to realize as they wished. He tells them, for example, to do something of their choosing for a certain number of seconds, then something else for a given number of seconds. A few of the resulting recordings are chosen as the music for each dance.

“We layer a few recordings,” Mr. Moore explained in an interview, “and you’d think it would be a mess, but since they’re changing at the same time, it sounds like an ensemble, a conspiracy. Human beings are really great in finding order in chaos.”

A difference between the performances at the Invisible Dog and previous iterations of “The People to Come” will be the presence of live musicians in addition to the recordings. But the most significant distinction may be the participation of New Yorkers.

Photo

The choreographer Yanira Castro.Credit
Tsar Fedorsk

In Marlboro, Vt., the show took place in the town meeting house after weeks of extensive community engagement. Farmers brought apples as gifts. Children brought their parents. At Space Gallery in Portland, Me., a wide range of people contributed to the archive during a popular Art Walk the day before the show, then returned to see what would be done with their contributions.

“It felt like the town was there,” Ms. Castro recalled of both occasions, whereas “in New York you tend to get a lot of dance and art people.” She and her collaborators will be reaching out to their own communities this time — their friends and family, the schools that their children attend.

As the project evolved, an element that receded is direct performer-audience interaction. Now there’s less talking to the audience, less inviting of people onstage.

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“We asked ourselves, ‘What do we need to make better dances?’ ,” Ms. Castro said, “and the answer was to take out everything that wasn’t part of the creative process. As a result, the rehearsal space has become more intimate, the performers more vulnerable.”

Since each dancer approaches the process differently, the work has also become a series of portraits. “You feel you learn a lot about them by how they handle each situation,” Mr. Moore said. “And when they find something in the music, you can feel the audience tune in, too.”

That sense of connection can be seductive. “You feel you’re supporting the process, holding it together,” Mr. Moore said.

Luke Miller, one of the project’s dancers, said that the structure makes people comfortable with contributing. “They see that they can give anything, and it’s going to be transformed.” he said. “Even though we’re creating these solos, it becomes larger. The layers start accumulating, and the echoes become as important as the new material.”

In freeing her viewers, Ms. Castro has had to learn to accept their behavior: one woman, for example, liked to whoop, a sound that the performers picked up and transformed into howling. And then there’s the loss of authorship: if the piece is working as she designed it, she cannot fix anything.

“The entire process is about the possibility for failure,” she said. “There will be dances that just don’t come together.”

Perhaps the greatest surprise for Ms. Castro, though, has been her own reaction to the moment near the end of each show when the audience’s attention is focused on one dancer transfigured by stage lights — the setup of a conventional performance.

“I’ve been sitting through this for three and a half hours,” she said. “I’ve just seen him rehearse, and yet there’s such expectation. What is he going to do? We don’t really know, and he probably doesn’t, either.”